Wednesday, February 21, 2007

The first is Corner Gas a Canadian production. The action takes place in a tiny town called Dog River. It's very sweet, with believable characters and some great dialogue and ideas. One episode featured a group creating a book club. The first book was something you'd expect a group like that to read "Life of PI". It quickly switches to reading action/thriller type novels when the second book was "The Saint in New York". (Side note, I own that edition of that particular book). Listening to their discussions about a Rambo novel and the original James Bond novels is pretty funny.

The second is completely different. It's Drawn Together, the animated version of Big Brother. Each of the 8 characters in the house is drawn in a different style including a Disney Princess, Japanese anime and the classic comic book hero. The humor here is rough, rude and crude. But it is quite different and you never know quite where they are going with each plot.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

We have, of late, been recording Top Gear - a British car show. Now, that isn't actually delibrate, the show is on in the time slot of MythBusters. That's a show we do watch.

So what is interesting is that I find Top Gear entertaining. I'm not at all into cars but they don't spend ages blabbing numbers and spouting car rubbish. They drive the cars. In all weather conditions. On real roads. And they chat to the camera about how the car feels and what it is doing.

They also have a weekly guest. They do a brief interview and then, show a video of the guest doing a lap with their standard car. The times are preserved and guests are ranked for how fast they did the lap. (There is also a practice lap and guests get some tutoring from 'The Stick'.) All the names and times are on the board and the new guest added at the right spot.

I think I like it for much the same reasons as MythBusters. It's guys having fun and showing off their abilities. The last episode I watched could be subtitled 'Why you should never buy a super car for less then 10,000 quid.' Not one of the 3 cars they bought survived the challenge of the day.

Not a true fan yet. The presenters are still 'the short one', 'the fuzzy one' and 'the other one'.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Townsville, for the first time in a number of years, is having a proper wet season. It started raining 17 January and there has been a bit of rain most days since. In fact, quite a lot of rain on a few days. Our rain total for 2007 is now 735 mm - about 29 inches of water. Much of that has fallen since the first of Feb.

Townsville is so unused to having rain that the first few days of rain, you could watch people going to windows and doors just to stare at this strange wet stuff. But I think everyone is ready for a couple of sunny days as a break. I know I need some sun to dry the laundry out.

Friday, February 02, 2007

There are times when I realise how sadly geeky I truly am. Yesterday, was very exciting because I successfully created an excel spreadsheet and xslt transformation sheet that means I'll be able to map research sites on Google Earth. Give me a set of sites with latitude and longitude (doesn't matter if you use decimal or old fashioned coordinates either) and I can send you back a Google Earth kml file.